What Patients Teach: The Everyday Ethics of Health Care

This book answers two fundamental questions: what are the things that allow patients' relationships with medical staff to become therapeutic? What can it teach us about healthcare ethics? The authors provide detailed descriptions and analyses of 55 interviews with 58 patients representing a broad spectrum of diseases and physician specialties. The ethics of everyday interdependence becomes apparent, with reciprocal obligations arising from moral symbiosis. The professional expression of healthcare ethics and the field of bioethics needs to be deconstructed with this distinctive, more patient-centred turn in the way we understand both patient care as a whole and the ethics of care more specifically.